Joe Marchese, President of Advanced Advertising Products at Fox Networks Group, was inducted into the American Advertising Federation’s Advertising Hall of Achievement at an induction ceremony in New York City today. The Hall of Achievement, founded in 1993, honors outstanding advertising leaders age 40 and under.

In the company of his parents, wife and others, Joe thanked the Hall of Achievement Executive Committee for including him in the 2016 class and congratulated his six fellow honorees. He reflected on starting digital advertising platform true[X] with co-founder David Levy, who was also in attendance.

“While the industry rushed towards an onslaught of trillions of cheap ads, you all signed on to a vision of fewer, more expensive ads. I still have no idea what we were thinking,” Joe said.

He also touched on the goal of advertising: “Advertising is, or at least should be, the attempt to value human attention. The ability to gather and direct attention shapes our world, making human attention, without a doubt, the world’s most valuable resource.”

While the internet was built to reflect how advertising dollars are spent, it gave rise to a list of undesirable outcomes, including content farms, social media clickbait and fraud because the industry used cost-per-impression to value a consumer’s time.

“This has left true storytellers – the documentarians and the artist, the writers and the producers who show us the world as it really is and let us dream about how it could be – questioning their ability to count on brand advertising,” Joe said.

He closed by issuing a challenge to the advertising industry: “In an age of Netflix, HBO, Hulu ad-free and DVRs, will advertising play a role in the greatest stories to come? Will it help make them available to more people? Will it help favor quality over clickbait? I think the answer has to be yes. At least I hope so, or I’m not sure what someone with ‘advertising’ in their title will do at a big media company!”